A Web-site that is heavily trafficked will often use more than one server for data communications and to serve content, and in many cases the content served by each of these servers will be identical. In a situation where multiple servers are employed, load balancers can be implemented to help manage the data communication traffic for the Web-site. Load balancers are network devices which can be used to distribute the processing and/or communications activity across a Web-site (e.g., balancing traffic to the servers) so that no one server is overwhelmed. For example, if one server is receiving excessive traffic (e.g., excessive user requests), a load balancer can be implemented to redirect some of the traffic to another server which has excess capacity.
The increasing popularity of the Internet has created a need for highly scalable and redundant groups of servers that host content and services over the Internet. The use of network load balancers to create such scalable and redundant environments is now prevalent across enterprise datacenters, where a particular datacenter that hosts content and/or services on the Internet may utilize multiple network load balancers from several different manufacturers in order to establish a scalable and redundant environment.